Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Arrogance:
Should a company have the right to sue a state or city or nation if
that city, state or nation passes a law or regulation to protect the
health of its citizens and that regulation prevents the company from
profiting from a clearly harmful product? If you answered 'yes', you
probably negotiated the TPP. Previews:
Revenues of S&P 500 corporations are expected to fall 2.8% in
2014Q1 – the largest y/y drop in over 5 years. Blame it on the
recovery. Mission
Impossible:
George Soros is reportedly ready to buy pour $1 billion into
Ukraine. Humanitarian. Heat's
On:
The temperature on the Antarctic Peninsula reached 63.5°F.
Counterintuitively,
this is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth. Timed
Travel:
Virginia has increased retention time for license plate data
gathered by trafic cams and license plate readers from seven days to
60 – because it might come in handy.

Bricks
Without Straw:Iron
ore has
dropped to a six-year low. Strange,
the
jobless recovery isn't
short on irony.

Fine,
Just Fines:
Nashville's DA has told his prosecutors that they can no longer make
mandatory sterilization a condition of a plea deal. “No longer.”

Pledge
Drive:Mrs.
Clinton(Housewife,
NY) wants the US to suck up to Israel. John McCain (Old Guy, AZ)
wants Israel to bomb
Iran back into the sand age. Two
Rights:
When the Iranian Guard in Iraq claimed that a US drone killed two of
its advisers, the US said it had only struck militants.

Noted:
Don't worry, you're not going crazy; that
recovery they keep
talking about - that
has nothing
to do with you.

One
Brick Shy:
The mayor of Ferguson, MO says it is not fair to him, his
administration or the city for the Justice Department to focus on
race and not mention
the good things about the city. Pressed for an example he...

Monday, March 30, 2015

Freedom
To Hate:
Nineteen
states now have laws encouraging hate
crimes
discrimination against anyone for anything as long as you pretend it
is firmly based in your religious dogma. Does
this mean I can put up a sign saying “No Christians allowed”?
They are truly anathema to me. Let's
encourage the companies
and organizations
(and the
State of Washington) for standing up for America. Repeat
After Me:
Abortions are not reversible, no matter what Republicans in Arizona
are forcing doctors to say.

Shadow
Boxing:
Republicans in the Senate have passed a
meaningless wish-list budget full of red meat for the Far Right -
pretending to cut $5.1 trillion from the working poor, homeless and
hungry over the next ten years, while heaping hundreds of billions on
defense contractors and cutting taxes on everyone who has donated
over a million to a secret PAC. It's all for show, but it does show
where their wallets are padded. Ted Cruz and Ron Paul both voted
against the budget, viewing it as too liberal. Is
Jobless Growth Inevitable?
Yes, as long as the credit bubble lasts.

We're
Doomed:After
twenty-two years of ever more documented evidence, no more Americans
are concerned about global warming/climate change today than they
were
in 1989. Pay attention, class, there will
be
a test.

Body
Count:Physicians
For Social Responsibility, the
largest physician-led organization in the US working to protect the
public from the threats of nuclear proliferation, climate change, and
environmental toxins, reports
that in the course of losing the War on Terror, the US has killed
over 1.3 million people, nearly all civilians and mostly women and
children, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bingo!
Somebody should tell Louie Gohmert (R– TX) that he's right, the
FCC is “playing God with the Internet” - that's what they are
supposed to be doing, regulating. It's nice to see at least part of
the government doing its job.

An
Ouch Of Prevention:
Europeans have been told to close their Facebook accounts if they
want to keep their personal information private. Just go cold turkey,
or be one.

Fact
File:Israel
killed
more Palestinians in 2014 than in any year since 1967. Blackmail:
For a fee of $30 to $60 a month, AT&T promises not to spy on
your web browsing and TV viewing habits and sell that information to
those who want to drown you in targeted advertising. Porn
O'Graph:
Visit Indiana! (Some restrictions may apply.)

Friday, March 27, 2015

Farm
Teams:
The US, having completely screwed the pooch in Yemen, is supplying
logistical and intelligence support (from afar, having
lost their in-country perches and drone
bases) to a pickup team headed
by Saudi Arabia with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qutar, Jordon, Sudan, Egypt
and even Pakistan rounding out the roster, waging war on the so-far
victorious Iranian backed Houthi rebels. This
religious war between the Sunni
(Saudi, al-Qadea et al) against Shiia (Iran and their dependent
terror squads). The pending conflagration threatens both oil fields
and oil transport routes, causing oil prices to rise and stocks to
fall. Last
Grasp:RadioShack
is
auctioning off to the highest bidder all of the customer personal
data it has acquired over the years.

Plain
Text:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will permit (actually,
encourages) corporations to sue the US government as well as state
and local governments for any law or regulation that they feel
diminishes the amount of profit they could make if they didn't have
to worry about pollution,
safety and that sort of thing. The
cases would not be heard in US courts, but
in extra-judicial investor-state dispute tribunals
constituted by and for the corporations under the guise of the World
Bank. It
makes private corporations the
legal equivalent of sovereign states, permitting them to
privately enforce a public treaty. The
whole thing stinks, especially the part where they call it a
trade agreement. The only trade is
our sovereignty for their profits.

Fiefdom
of Choice:Republicans in AZ have passed legislation barring women using the
federal healthcare marketplace from buying insurance that would
cover abortion. Spare
Parts:
Next month the Pentagon is sending the first increment of US troops
to Ukraine, while a bit to the south the US Air Force is flying
air stirkes in support of Iranian troops in Iraq, while providing
support for air strikes against Iran's designated representatives in
Yemen. It's called pragmatism.

The
Wilder West:
Republican controlled Kansas
is
joining AL, AR, VT, and WY in permitting any adult citizen to carry a
concealed weapon because
"Carrying a gun is a lifestyle,"and
you never know when you might have to shoot a gay, an abortionist, a
stray liberal or an uppity female. Teaching
Points:
Representative Ron Johnson (Retard, WI) says Federal loans to
students are a waste of taxpayer money because “loans are actually
pretty easy to get, and college is a lot of fun.” And college is
too expensive; he says it has gone from $1,000 a year in the 1960's
to over $18,000 now. Actually, I went to an fairly cheap college in
the 60's and it cost more than $1,000 a year, and my grandkids are
going to pretty middle-of the road institutions for about $50,000 a
year. But they are having fun.

Framing:
Over the last few years, home prices in the US have outpaced wage
growth 13:1. Home prices are being driven by speculators – hedge
funds, institutional investors, international buyers, and gamblers,
not by people who want to live in them.

Clause
& Affect:Salesforce,
a
leading cloud computing company, has annoucned it is “canceling
all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to
Indiana... because
of the
state's embrace of discrimination against gays, interracial
couples, unmarried women without burkas, blacks, midgets and so on...
and others who don't measure up to whatever religious yardstick
someone wants to use. The NCAA has condemned the Republican Governor
and legislature for passing and signing the bill. Keith
Olbermann
is using his pulpit to urge the NFL to boycott the state until it
comes to its senses. Equal
Opportunity:
The SEC has decided that it is only right that the average American
be permitted (if not actually encouraged) to lose his
life savings betting on startups.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Think
of balance sheet “goodwill” much as the value of a marriage
before the divorce.

Gentle
Ben
Warren:
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has hired a
management company to fire thousands as Heinz is merged with Kraft,
creating the world's fifth largest
manufacturer of food-like substances. The goal of the merged company
is to “create savings of $1.5 billion a year” which is an awful
lot of $15 an hour jobs, while protecting Warren's Good Guy
Capitalist image. Last
Last Chance:
The mandarins running Europe have given Greece five days (until
Monday next) to submit a written plan detailing step by step how
Athens will make all of the changes (for which read “privatizations”)
that the banks want.

Especial
Ops:
US Special Operations forces will be practicing suppressing civilian
unrest in “training drills” across seven southwestern states this
summer, in a process designed to accustom US citizens to the presence
of armed military swarming from helicopters and waving guns around.
Commanders explained that exercises like this allow soldiers to train
in environments similar to anticipated future deployments, which
explains why they've built
a mockup of Washington, DC including subway traincars with Metro
logos for “realistic practice occupying urban areas.“

Both
Sides Now:
In Yemen, government troops armed with US weapons are fighting
against Houthi rebels, who are also armed with (liberated) US
weapons.
If you are keeping score at home, Yemen is a US backed Saudi satrapy
and the Houthi rebels are backed by our new friends in Tehran.
Al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula is also trying to matter.

Goose/Gander:
Google thinks that as long as you are watching TV, the TV should be
watching you. And tattling on you to advertisers. Well, at least
they're not the NSA. Yet. Snip,
Snip:In
AK,
Kim Hammer, a
Republican state representative (and far too
representative at that)
has introduced a bill that would
“give
single
mothers on Medicaid an incentive to get surgical contraception so
they can take “a little bit of a breather to think about their life
decisions that are affecting us as taxpayers.” Of
course it's just aimed at single mothers because
married women have men around to make their life decisions for them.

Party
Hearty:
In CT, GOP state representative Mike Bocchion noted that “At the
end of the day, if there are not witnesses [to date rape and gang
rape at college] at
least if there are
it is a great party.” He says his remarks were taken out of
context and that he hadn't given his consent...

Another
Damned Thing:
Not only do we have to worry about running out of water – that was
yesterday's story – the UN says that we have been abusing the soil
so badly that within 60 years much of the world's
farmland will be exhausted. Which is okay, because we're going to
run out of water 20 years before that.

Privacy
Acts:
At a closed meeting in London, the World Bank, USAID, Syngenta (a
seed and biotch firm) and the Gates Foundation met to plan the
privatization of African seed saving and swaping, preventing
traditional farmers from saving and sharing seeds. No farmers nor
farm organizations were permitted to attend the meeting.

Made
To Order:
Orders for durable goods in the US fell again last month, making it 3
out of 4. The biggest disappointment was
capital goods ex-aircraft orders, which were down 7.6%. It's
becoming a pray as you go recovery. Porn
O'Graph:
Jobs, left and right.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Bingo:As
part of Ted
Cruz's
personal sacrifice in his drive to serve the public, when his wife
took leave of absence from Goldman Sachs to traipse around with him,
the family lost her company-sponsored health care insurance. So,
naturally, they've signed up for Obamacare.

Turning
Up:
In a clever twist on the “paid political announcement”, Liberty
University assured Ted Cruz a full house by charging each of its
10,000 students ten bucks if they didn't show up and sit through the
show. Paying attention was optional.

Spin
Is Spin;
IBM's CEO is boasting that the company is not only going to market
its products and services in China, it is going to work with the
Chinese in building its IT sector. Which will, of course, put IBM
out of business there, but that's the idea. The Chinese idea.

Vive
la différence.
In most of the world the sick are called patients, in the US they're
customers.

Self
Exam: Why
should atheists have to show respect for religion? Damned
if I know.

It's
Simple:
The problem with the homeless is that they are... well, homeless.
And the cheapest, most effective solution to homelessness is to give
the homeless homes. It is even cheaper than doing nothing at all for
them.

Manners:
In an attempt to win friends and influence Congress, Israel spied on
the US/Iranian talks and related selected bits to their puppets on
the Hill in an attempt to torpedo the talks. Obama is not amused.
McCain, with or without Israeli or AIPAC help, has threatened to have
Congress withhold
funding from the UN if the US continues to ignore Bibi's wishes.

On
The Road:
Martin O'Malley, former
MD
governor, is running around the country waging Elizabeth Warren's
campaign for president.

Picture
This:
After San Diego cops
began wearing (required) body cameras, civilian complaints have
dropped 40%, the use of “personal body force” by officers is down
46%, and the use of pepper spray has declined 30%.

Go
Away:
Ted Cruz's goals: Lower
taxes and abolish
the IRS (which
is redundant).
Abolish Obamacare. Completely seal US borders
then
round up and ship all the undocumented... somewhere.
No gay marriage. No abortions. Ignore global warming. Fight
religious wars, both in the Middle East and Middle America. And
shut down the government from time to time.
Go, Ted. Go away.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Payback:
Obama's Chief of Staff called on Israel to end its “50-year
occupation” and
withdraw
from all
occupied
Palestinian territories. The
White House also
suggested
that Israel's get-out-of-jail-free card at the UN might expire and
that Bibi's “sorry” didn't cut it, John McCain
got – and I'm reading from the AIPAC talking points here -
“upset”. Initiation
Ritual:
Senate Republicans, needing to pretend they control the Obama White
House, will delay confirming Loretta Lynch as Attorney General
because... well, they don't really have a reason.

For
Sale, Make An Offer:
The administration, in conjunction with the states,
is undertaking another effort to sell off more US factories, forests
and infrastructure to foreign investors.

Q&A:
“Is a new political system emerging in this country?” In short,
yes. But it is not 'emerging', it is nearly full grown and pushing
the smaller, weaker, earlier version called popular democracy out of
the nest. Elections are now by and for the 1%. Government has been
essentially privatized by Wall Street and the rich. The President
and Congress have been marginalized in the new national security
state – which makes the Stasi, the KGB and the Gestapo look like
children's playthings. Privacy has become a mythic memory. Like
global warming, the evidence of democracy's demise is all around and
we refuse acknowledge it. Concentrations of wealth lead to
concentrations of power and may well soon lead to concentration
camps. A
new
kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before
our eyes. We
should stop
pretending it’s not happening.

Picture
Perfect:
Apple, a designer of toys manufactured in Asian sweat shops, will
soon be valued at more than $1 trillion. Anybody got a clue?

Don't
Look Now:
As the dollar strengthened against foreign currencies, US companies
that make significant profits overseas have seen the value of those
earnings drop. Companies that earn half of their profits outside the
US are expected to show over a 10% decline in earnings in the first
quarter. And those corporations with billions overseas will also
find the mice have been nibbling at their cheese – maybe to the
extent that it would have been cheaper to pay their taxes in the US.

Protect
And Sever:
AZ Republicans want to pass a bill to permit the identities of cops
who kill civilians to be kept secret, in order to protect the guilty. Noted:
The F-35 is quite possibly the absolutely worst clusterfuck the
Pentagon and the politicians have ever engaged in. The $1.4 trillion
boondoggle is too big and too expensive to cancel even though it does
not work and is not likely to ever do so. It is the epitome of the
military-industrial complex's dominant position in American political
and economic existence. Cautionary
Tale:
FEMA says that beginning next year states that do not have
governor-supported climate change mitigation programs will not
receive federal disaster preparedness funds. Republican troglodytes
will most certainly bellow and stomp and hold hearings and all that
jazz.

Nor
Any Drop to Drink:
The UN says that absent timely actions today, the world will face a
40% shortfall in water within 15 years. And like everything else
connected to global climate change, nothing will be done until it is
too late.

In
God We Thrust;
Sam Johnson (Religious Enforcer, TX) wants the USAF Academy to
abolish the freedom from religion and force all cadets to include
“so
help me God” as
part of their annual oath of office because the only way to protect
religious freedom is to abolish it and force everyone to genuflect to
one nation, under GOP.

Monday, March 23, 2015

In
the long term the medium term is far too
uncertain to bother about in the short term.Demetrius

Score
35 to 1:
The US has officially lost the struggle with China over the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese initiative that has now
gathered contributions from Great Britain, France, etc. etc.
Washington
picked a completely
unnecessary fight with China over the
bank because they saw it as a challenge to the
traditionally US-dominated IMF
and Word Bank. Which it is. China, in a reverse on the West's
one-time Gunboat Diplomacy in China, is demanding its place on the
world stage through Checkbook Diplomacy at the expense of the United
States which had dominated international finance since World War Two.
Even the IMF and
World Bank are joining th China-led initiative. This
is an
historic
shift away from US hegemony. Washington has belatedly conceeded that the AIIB is a Good Idea, but only if "it works in partnership" with the US owned & operated World Bank..

Last
Things:Things
have gotten so bad in the Greece vs. Germany grudge match that a mere
12 hours after a two days of marathon negotiations the two sides
could not even agree on what they had – supposedly triumphantly –
agreed on. Greece, quite simply, is
both
broke and broken and Germany is going to keep kicking the Greeks
until the situation improves, which is not going to happen. Another
One Bites The Dust:
The US has retreated
evacuated troops from a base in south Yemen as our enemies
consolidate their defeat and humiliation of yet another US puppet. Bootleg
Option Play:
After six months of coquettish bumblilng
about
the timing of interest
rate hikes,
soft and softening US economic data may lead to the Fed trotting out
QE4 instead of boosting interest rates. Someday, perhaps way in the
distance, an acknowledgement will have to be made that QE's 1 -3
failed. This, in turn, should not do Draghi's attempts in the EU much
good. Additional currency warfare, behind polite smiles, will
continue; beggar not just the hindmost, but most likely, all. Piece
Movement:
The US Army Europe (the occupation force left over from 1945) will
dispatch “columns of Stryker vehicles” on a road march across
Easten
Europe this spring in a novel exercise designed
to reassure
American's allies and to piss off Putin. Win-win.

Mouths
of Babes:Senator
John McCain
excused
Netanyahu's racist diatribes during the closing hours of his
re-election campaign as “just politics” and reminded reporters
that politicians cannot be held to everything they say just to get
elected.

Magic
Act:
The Republicans have a new & improved Magic Asterisk Budget,
based, like its predecessor, on the irrational and disproven belief
that tax cuts for the rich improve the lot of the poor and result in
balanced budgets. Dishonesty on this scale is new even for the
current crop of Republicans. “The simplest way to understand these
budgets is to suppose that they are intended to do what they would,
in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families
poorer.” And they are grounded in the equally firmly held
Republican belief that they can fool the American public at least one
more time. It is another “enormous,
destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.”

Healthy
Caring:California
has
stripped
Blue Shield of its non-profit status. The
insurance giant has
$4.2 billion in the bank and
pays its CEO
$5 million a
year to
deny as many claims as possible.

-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Scientific
results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by
some future experiment or observation. Here's the current crop of
observations from the frontiers of global climate change. Broken
Record:
February 2014 was the second warmest February on record and, despite
a a
couple of blizzards here
and there, was part of the warmest winter on record for the Northern
Hemisphere. 2014 was also the warmest calendar year on record.

Nor
Any Drop:
As their available supplies of water decline, San Francisco Bay Area
water agencies are planning to charge more for the diminishing amount
they have, in order to cover lost income from the absent water. In
Nevada, it's the Gamblers
verses the Mormons. The
Anthropocene:Humanity
is the most powerful force on the planet, shaping the environment
more than water, wind, or plate tectonics. Unless something
on the scale of a giant meteor impact or massive volcanic activity
intervenes, the
earth
will carry the geologic evidence of mankind's impact for tens of
thousands if not millions of years. It is quite possible we'll
attain this goal through nuclear war, but far more likely that we'll
peacefully
(all things are relative...) provoke
sufficient global warming to change the earth beyond recognition –
and beyond human habitation.

They're
Baaack:
NOAA confirms that El
Niño has officially arrived, and is
likely to
boost global warming to new record levels. Simultaneously,
the Pacific Decadal Oscillation reached
record levels this winter and, along with El Niño could kick
off a
surge in
global warming lasting 5 to 10 years. Down
South:
The Totten Glacier in East Antarctica is melting
from below as warm ocean currents reach further into Antarctic
waters. The glacier acts as a stopper to restrain 538,000 square
kilometers of ice from flowing into the ocean. Scientists now say
that this inevitable and irreversible collapse will raise the world's
oceans by 11 feet over then next
couple of hundred years. Joined with the collapse of the West
Antarctic ice sheet – which will add its own 11 feet of sea level
rise and is also now deemed to be inevitable and irreversible –
the six to ten feet Greenland's melting ice cap is going to
contribute becomes
just
a footnote.

Peak
Peek:
This
year'smaximumextent
of winter
sea
ice in the Arctic is
the
lowest on record.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Easy
Come, Easy Go:
The ever stronger US dollar stubbed its toe Friday, losing the most
against the euro in over three years and sparking a rally in stocks
and oil as investors celebrated the weakening of the US economy. Go
figure.

Ghost
Of Crisis Past:Nationwide,
the percentage
of underwater homeowners has been flat for the last two quarters
(after 10 consecutive quarters of decline) and homeowers repeating
the foreclosure process jumped 11% m/m. Both
new and repeat foreclosures hit a 12-month high during January and
housing
starts fell 17% m/m in February. Nationally, 17% of all houses
with a mortgage are underwater – worth less than the amount owed.
Twenty-seven percent of those on the lower end of the price range are
underwater.

Water
Soluble:
All we have to do in the face of California's drought is to
completely change where and how we grow our food.

Reloading:
Speaker Boehner has been summoned to Israel to receive his latest
marching orders from Netanyahu, “further strengthening the bond
between Wall Street, Congress and Israel's right wing government." Noted:
“If economists and their statistics were right, you would have had
a raise by now.”

One
Shoe:
The administration has issued regulations requiring hydrofrackers to
disclose
the chemicals they use. Republicans will be rushing to the podium to
denounce this new overreach by the dictator in the White House as
soon as lobbyists for the fracking industry get the talking points
written. Because
I Said So:
That hypoallergenic cream on the counter isn't really hypoallergenic
because the term is meaningless. Expensive but meaningless.

Criminalizing
Hope:
House Republicans have proposed making being an illegal alien a
federal crime (currently it is a civil offense) and giving every cop
in the country the power to enforce federal immigration law,
arresting anyone they suspect of being an illegal who cannot produce
residence papers. Absent proof of legal status, the individual would
immediately be put into the deportation chain. This, like most of
what the Republicans in Congress do, will not become law, nor is it
intended to; it is just red meat to toss to the crazies on the far
right.

Freeloading:
Republican Bruce Rauner, Governor of Illinois, has instructed all
state agencies to stop giving money from non-union workers to unions,
because parasites vote Republican. And
On The Seventh Day:
Currently, the law in feudal Wisconsin requires that workers
employed in a “factory or mercantile establishment” must receive
“at least 24 consecutive hours of rest in every 7 consecutive days”
unless the worker and employer jointly seek exemption. In order to
reduce the burden of government paperwork on employers, Republicans
in the state legislature plan to remove the requirement, essentially
allowing employers to demand workers show up seven days a week
forever.

Mental
Health Coverage: Florida state employees who talk about climate change or global
warming are suspended from work until a mental health evaluation
verifies their “fitness for duty” in Rick Scott's utopia. Not
News:
The world's forests continue to be cut into ever smaller tracats,
encouraging and
enabling
mass extinctions.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Das
Finger:
The sociopaths at the tone-deaf European Central Bank opened its new
€1.3
billion building
this week, flaunting its presumed power even as the economy it is
not-so-slowly ruining continued to rack up victims. What does a bank
do that requires a €1.3
billion monument?

California
Dreaming:
With Sierra
snowpack
at 12%of normal, after last year's
28%, regulators
have ordered the state's water agencies to
restrict their customers'
use of water on landscaping.
California is also preparing a $1 billion plan to make
the desert bloom again, make water appear from nowhere, and – for
over $750 million of the fund – building “flood control
structures” .
And next year, how much? Clip
And Save:
The US EIA now says that oil production from the three largest US
shale areas is now in decline. Because shale wells have very steep
first year decline rates, the EIA expects that total US oil output
will begin to decline in the third quarter and that global demand for
petroleum products will grow by at least 2
million barrels per day by
the 4th
quarter.

Victory:
In celebration of Netanyahu's
re-election, Israel sent dozens of bulldozers and other military
vehicles to an Arab village near Nablus, where they uprooted 300
olive trees and razed over 3 miles of stone walls. Israel has
uprooted over 800,000 olive trees in the occupied territories since
1967.

Tribute:
In a moving tribute to Texans right to shoot whenever, whomever
and wherever, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed the
Whitman Act which would encourage the carrying of guns on college
campuses, buildings and towers. Flocking
Around:
State health and safety officials from MN to AR are going farm-door
to farm-door, issuing quarantines in an attempt to stop the largest
outbreak on record of bird-flu in the US – without upsetting the
massive and massively profitable poultry industry.

Equal
But Separate:Texas,
leading
yet another display of righteous idiocy, is suing the US Labor
Department in an attempt to keep same-sex couples from taking family
medical leave, because gays shouldn't be allowed to take time off to
care for their sick children. About
That Bridge in Selma:
A 54 year old black man has been found hanged from a tree in
Claiborne County, Missippi. Next door in Tennessee, the Baptists have
put up a sign reminding us that “Satan
was the first to demand equal rights.” At Fort Wainwright,
Alaska, the US Army's 21st
Infantry Regiment gives
soldiers permission to use racial slurs without fear of consequences
on
“Racial
Thursdays”. On
Getting That Education:
After adjusting for inflation, surveys show that only
36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000, a sharp
decline from the 1990s. Over
20% of young people make below $25,000 a year, far lower than in
1990.It's
one hell of a recovery.

Ready,
Set...
The inestimable Louie Gohmert (Irrational, TX) says “It’s
time to bomb Iran.” Well,
at least we spelled his name right, which seems to be what
he was after. Again.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.